The Aesthetics and Rhetoric of the Technological Arts
Interface Machines

Introduction

Over the course of the twentieth century, art evolved in the
direction of according more and more importance to
interactivity, performance, installation and the participation
of the public. The emergence of an aesthetics of the media arts
in which networks, interface machines and sensors play an
increasingly important role in the creative process raises
questions pertaining to the status of the artist and the nature
of the work. Technological interfaces, especially in the field
of the visual arts, abolish the old aesthetic and cultural
categories. These technological interfaces then spread through
sensory and extra-sensory channels, availing of multi-modal
processes in which proprioception, tactility, emotivity and body
posture become forms, so many new indications of the return of
the senses. Multimedia installations no longer rest on any given
medium but on processes in action, retroaction and
becoming. This leads in turn to the disappearance of the medium,
of the material substratum. What becomes of painting when
machines start to paint? What becomes of the work of art in the
age of digital reproduction? How do these art forms combine to
bring about the emergence of a new aesthetics? This paper is a
response to the various questions raised by the use of digital
interfaces in the technological arts as witnessed in
contemporary artistic practice.

An Observation

At rare intervals in the history of art, the manner in which
different societies perceived the world changed at the same time
as their manner of existence. The construction of this manner of
perception, the medium in which it is situated, is not solely
determined by human nature but also by historical circumstances,
conceptual mutations, technological advances and epistemological
breaks. The manner in which we conceive of matter, space and
time has changed considerably since the beginning of the twentieth
century. As the evolution of modern art is closely tied to these
changes, it is now important to examine the relationship between
the different artistic, scientific and technological
disciplines. Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
traditional cultures are undergoing a decisive
transformation. Despite their long-standing traditions,
classical art forms can seemingly no longer fully respond to the
changes taking place in society. New types of highly complex
culture are now emerging: media culture and techno
culture. These combine the advances in telecommunications with
new means of approaching space and time and with epistemological
and philosophical mutations to produce the hybridisation of our
systems of thought and of artistic creation. This paradigm shift
entails the transformation of the space-time relationship. While
still linked to academic and corporate laboratories, artistic
experiments in the field of new technology and of the
‘virtual’ are becoming more and more accessible to
the broader public. Once collective, these experiments have
metamorphosed into individual productions. Their initial aims
and characteristics, which privileged participation and
activity, have given way to a mediatisation based on the
circulation and interaction between place, artist, spectator and
artwork. Unlike the installations and in situ peregrinations of
the 1970s, many of these contemporary installations offer a wide
range of experiences in the guise of sensory manipulation and
real-time communication.

The possibilities of exploration and deterritorialisation
opened up by these new paths are inscribed in a framework which
prefigures ever more chaotic and unpredictable encounters
between the body and language, between unmediated space and the
medium. These mutations at the very heart of the notion of
installation are related to the qualities of instability and
nomadism and to the possibilities opened up by the field of
artificial intelligence. Artists have been exploring cyberspace
for several years now and are discovering items of interest for
sound ecology as well as for the more metaphorical locales of
collaborative creation. Such locales are not only hybrid zones
where the body in action takes into account the specificities of
a certain site or creative space, but are also new
‘territories’ propitious to the development of a
‘digital ironmonger's.’ These hybrid zones will
allow for the real-time construction of ‘interface
machines’ whose raison d'être will no longer be the
installation itself but rather communication.

Hypothesis

The status of knowledge and technology changed at the same
time as society entered the digital age and culture the
cybernetic age. This transformation began early in the 1980s,
and the 1990s saw an acceleration in the development of digital
interfaces. A paradigm shift has therefore been taking place
over the course of the last twenty years. In the fields of
science, technology and culture, knowledge and research are now
directed at language. The consumer society which was made
possible by the technological revolution which followed the
Second World War has been replaced by the information society, a
post-industrial society in which work and know-how count less
than the act of making known. Current scientific and
technological research into information theory, genetics, modern
algebra, computers, linguistic theories, questions of
translation and the problems of man/machine communication
reflects the cultural evolution which our society is
undergoing. The impact of these technological changes on culture
and artistic creation is considerable indeed. As the
technological arts are now developing a certain practice, a
certain means of using interactive processes, they are also
developing that play on form (artworks) and meaning that is
called rhetoric.

General Aesthetics, Individual Aesthetics

The conflict between the unreality of the image and the
reality of historical content, between the imaginary and the
real, resurfaces in every stage of aesthetic development. In the
traditional art forms, aesthetic images are not immutable, they
are not archaic invariants. The artist's subjective experience
produces images which are not images of some thing but of an
ideal form, even though that which he gives us to see is,
apparently, a material object or physical form. It is in this
way that art is linked to the experience of facts, for it takes
shape in the technological reality of the world, a reality in
which the genesis of a work in the mind and imagination is tied
to its existence as a physical phenomenon. The artistic process
used to consist in rendering the invisible visible. Contemporary
artistic practice, on the other hand, consists in rendering the
visible invisible (and vice versa) – this can be achieved
by the use of new technologies which replace the classic
dialectic of the real and the imaginary with a ternary logic in
which the virtual assumes pride of place. This in turn entails
an opening out of the concept of aesthetics. The aesthetics of
form and content, as propounded by Hegel, Nietzsche, WÃ¶lfflin,
Focillon, Greenberg, Panofsky and Ehrenzweigh, is now paralleled
by relational, communicational and situationist aesthetics
– aesthetics of process. Therefore, in the field of
artistic creation, the guiding aesthetic principles are no
longer form, content, mimesis, truth, the physical, the visible,
uniqueness, the emotional state of the spectator and/or the
artist, but are instead communication, the surface, immersion,
hybridisation, synthesis, the rhizome, the network, factual
time, accelerated time, uchronia, the fluid, the transitory, the
ephemeral, the ambiguous, the invisible, reproduction, identity,
the collective, the nomadic, diversity, the installation,
performance, interactivity, multi-modality, exchanges,
participation, circularity.

The Aesthetics of Form – The Aesthetics of Processes

Until as recently as the 1960s, all aesthetic changes were
the manifestations of and manifestos for material developments
which were adapted, transformed and transmitted by art. Until
the decline of figurative painting, the object represented a
form, even in cubism. Form is undoubtedly mediatised by content,
just as content is mediatised by form, but the content of a
painting is not only that which it represents, but also all the
colours, structures and relations it contains. In the same way,
the content of a multimedia art work is not limited to what it
represents but also includes the other elements it brings into
play: structures, interfaces, distance, memory, practice,
interactivity, virtuality. The concept of form effectively
constitutes aesthetics' blind spot – this is because art
in its entirety is so attached to it that it becomes impossible
to isolate it. That said, art is not simply identical to or
reducible to form, even if it cannot be defined in any other
manner. Even if the unity of form tends to break down in much
structurally complex modern art, it nonetheless remains an
underlying element. Open forms existed long before the current
all-pervasive crisis, but never in the history of art has the
questioning of form been expressed with such force and intensity
as now. It is therefore time to abandon the formalist approach
which has dominated up to now and adopt instead a sort of
phenomenology of appearances [25].

Form and matter are no longer subject to each other (unlike
in Hegel's thought) and this is because of the factual
disjunction of the medium caused by multi-modal processes. That
which is now mediatised in art, and which ensures that art works
are more than simple representations, must necessarily be
mediatised by means of multi-modal interfaces. It is only such
interactions which can establish correlations in the field of
media art. This relational or interactive aesthetics, which
developed from communicational aesthetics, is coupled with an
aesthetics of interfaces and situations, a situationism in which
installation and performance are joined by variable
spatio-temporal modalities. Especially in the field of the
plastic arts, technological interfaces are erasing the old
aesthetic and cultural categories based on form and the senses
(visual, auditory, tactile). Multimedia installations no longer
rely on any given medium, but are instead based on processes in
action, retroaction, becoming, processes which are potentially
present. To classify these works according to the media they use
– video, holography, synthetic images – would amount
to putting an aesthetics of form and content into place, and
would therefore continue traditional aesthetic analysis.

Interface Space

For millennia now, humans have conceptualised the notions of
space and time – with which they can only interact by
obeying the unchanging laws of physics. Virtual reality allows
humans to remove themselves from physical reality and transform
time, place and type of interaction (interaction with an
environment which simulates reality or with an imaginary or
symbolic world). This interactive spatio-temporal approach
allows us to develop a working taxonomy for the different
applications of virtual reality, but also, through the
interfaces used, to deduce different aesthetics according to the
means by which these interfaces act and are used. As it has no
substance itself, the virtual is only an ephemeral model, a
digital database which interacts with humans. The virtual only
has a temporary reality within the digital machine and its
interfaces. Virtual space may be Euclidian, but is not
necessarily so – it may be paradoxical. In particular, the
uniqueness of a given place may be put into question by
tele-virtuality, in which users who are physically remote from
each other can share the same virtual space both sensorially and
cognitively. This space can, moreover, be perceived differently
by each user, just as in physical reality. Thanks to
‘interface machines,’ the real and the virtual can
now intertwine and fuse together – creating new
interactive forms in which the real, the virtual and the
imaginary find expression. These new performance spaces, which
link the visible with the hidden, can be found in more
traditional work from the 1970s, especially that of the artists
in Supports
/ Surfaces, or in the work of Buraglio which reveals the
duplicity of the image. They can also be found in contemporary
works: Le
salon des ombres (Hall of Shadows) by Luc
Courchesne, Shadow
Server by Kenneth Goldberg and Telenoia
by the Quarks.

Le salon des ombres, an interactive play first
staged in July 1997 involves four virtual characters. The
spectators enter a dark room – the ‘shadowy
lounge’ of the title – in which four characters,
four friends, are floating like ghosts. They appear as video
images projected from the ceiling and are reflected off sheets
of glass. Each character corresponds to an interactive
console.

When the play starts, the characters can be seen talking
amongst themselves, paying no attention to the audience. This
continues until a spectator intervenes by using a touch screen
to ask one of the characters a question. The character then
responds orally, initiating a debate which gradually centres
around important existential problems and in which each
character, real or virtual, must take a stand. The performance
lasts for a few minutes, after which the characters disappear,
having become conscious of the virtual nature of their
existence. The installation's aim was to create a true
‘group synergy, a democratic micro-society’ in which
political questions were debated in real time [10].

This question of reality – or truth – is at the
heart of Shadow Server. Created in July 1997 by
the American artist Kenneth Goldberg, Shadow
Server effectively delivers or projects shadows,
referring to Plato's allegory of the cave in the process. In
California, a box contains various objects which are lit by
several light sources. Members of the public can control these
light sources via the web and so produce different-shaped
shadows which flicker across their screens. What is the nature
of these ‘things’ which we have on the web? What do
we think we are getting: things or just their shadows?

Shadow Server is remarkable for more than one
reason. It inverts the questioning and watchwords which have
dominated electronic art over the last few years. It doesn't
render the ‘invisible visible,’ instead rendering
that which is normally visible invisible, leaving only shadows
remaining. The ‘thing’ itself is hidden and it is
the shadow which is important. The shadow becomes the thing. In
this work, Goldberg is reasserting the disappearance of the
object in art, a process which began at the beginning of the
twentieth century. The images created by Shadow Server
bring to mind Moholy-Nagy's
photograms. They capture light in a subtle manner before
projecting it onto the screen and also reintroduce the idea of
contemplation into a medium in which creation centres around
flux and movement.

Interface Time

Just as the interface is installed in a certain location, it
is also inscribed in time. Virtual time opens up new dimensions
for artists to explore. In order to better understand it, they
can either accelerate it or slow it down (simulated growth of
plants with a view to preparing an aesthetic study; simulated
ageing or vice versa). In the world of virtual objects,
interactions are principally visual, tactile or auditory –
they are sensory and behavioural. In this way, we can use our
physicality, expectations and body postures to unsettle the
virtual world and, thirty years on, give full meaning to Harald
Szeemann's remarkable 1969 exhibition in Bern, Switzerland
Quand les attitudes deviennent formes (When
Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head). **

Before it is something technological, the interface is
essentially a place, a marginal zone which facilitates
communication and the spatial and temporal interrelation of two
different conceptions of the world. It is an intermediary zone
which creates friction, contact with which obliges the spectator
to undergo the strange experience of a separation of the self,
as in Peter Campus's 1972 installation Interface.
In this work, as the spectator approaches the middle of the
room, his image is reflected in a large window located in a dark
part of the room. At the same time, a video camera placed on the
far side of the window projects a video image of the spectator
onto it. The window becomes both a mirror and a screen and is
the place where two different representations coexist. It is an
interface.

Meanwhile, the development of digital technology has led to a
diversification in the nature of interfaces. Artists can now
explore not only real spaces but also virtual spaces, creating
worlds in which spectators can completely immerse themselves. As
Nam June Paik has written of Edmond Couchot's wonderful Je
sème à tout vent,

By blowing into a small hole, the visitor causes a
dandelion to be dispersed across the screen, the degree of this
dispersal being dependent on the strength with which the person
blows [...] Jeffrey Shaw's work [The
Legible City], meanwhile, consists of a bicycle linked
up to a television screen. The visitor becomes a touring cyclist
and moves through the scenery at a speed which is related to the
amount of pressure placed on the pedals [26].

Because the artists use everyday objects placed in a natural
setting, these interfaces seem natural and easy to access. The
interface becomes transparent. The interface participates in the
transformation of the spectator's gaze, of exhibition value and
of exchange value. Such is its role, that, according to
Anne-Marie Duguet, the choice of interface can have ‘as
radical a consequence as the abolition of the frame in a pair of
spectacles, replacing the notion of the image with that of the
stage . . . ’ [12].

Faced with such a multitude of potential applications, a
working taxonomy of interfaces is now necessary. This taxonomy
must fit into the context of the exchange of information of a
spatial, temporal and interactive nature between real and
virtual worlds. As Annick Bureaud has suggested, it can be
characterised by typologies defined according to their physical
properties and use values [6]:

Interfaces which provide access to work (the web), and
which make use of existing technology without questioning it:
Waxweb by David Blair

Interfaces which make use of existing technology and which
question it: Shadow
Server by Kenneth Goldberg

Works constructed around their interface: A-Volve
by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau

A Taxonomy of Interfaces

This taxonomy is based on the inherent functions of virtual
reality, the field in which digital interfaces find their
fullest use, and allows us to better understand the different
aesthetics proposed by artists in their installations and
performances.

Three variables may bring about different states in the
fields of time, space and interactivity. (This premise echoes
– by inverting it – the one postulated by the tragic
authors in seventeenth-century France who advocated the rule of the
three unities of place, time and action.) These are theoretical
and not utopian potentialities, and they allow us to understand
not only the aesthetics underpinning works created with new
technology, but also to develop a rhetoric of interfaces.

Disconnected from the present time T0, the user can move about in the past T- or the future T+.

He may want to project himself into an otherwise
inaccessible place P# (be it geographic
or microscopic, for example), or meet others in a virtual
place PU. The notation P0 indicates that the place remains unchanged
or is not relevant for the application in question.

Virtual reality can create interactions either in a world
which simulates reality Ir or
else in an imaginary or symbolic world Ii. The notation I0 indicates that the interactions take
place in the real world.

Virtual reality implies interactions of a type Ir or Ii. It follows that tele-presence and
tele-operations (which involve interactions from a distance with
the real world (I0 * T0 * P0))
are not an intrinsic part of virtual reality, even if they make
use of the same kind of interfaces. The same can be said of
communications made via telephone or videophone or of
videoconferences (I0 * T0 * P0),
for which a specific type of communication aesthetics has been
envisioned [15]. Theoretically, there are
2×3^2 = 18 possible combinations for the two
classes Ir and Ii. However, different users meeting
together PU can only take place
in the present T0, and there are
therefore four combinations which are not possible: (Ir + Ii) * PU * (T- + T+).

I now propose distinguishing among twelve different aesthetic
forms which are to be found in current artistic practice:

In a World which Simulates Reality

In these applications, the aim is to provide a simulation of
reality in order to understand it better. The sensory channels
exploited depend on the desired application.

Ir * T0 * P0

Virtual activity. The user interacts with a virtual stage
for his pleasure. Use of multimedia is sufficient as the place
and time remain unchanged.

Ir * T0 * P#

Virtual transfer. The user is transported to a place
which simulates reality and where he can relax, do things,
etc. The time remains unchanged.

Ir * T0 * PU

Virtual tele-association. Several people have the
possibility of meeting in a virtual location –
Teleconference using virtual reality tools, virtual town,
etc.

Virtual development. Same possibilities as with virtual
conception, but concerning spaces and locations to be
developed – Town planning, landscaping, etc.

Ir * T- * P0

Virtual exhibition. Entails the recreation and
observation of objects which no longer exist.

Ir * T- * P#

Virtual event. By recreating historical events, the user
is given the opportunity of better understanding them.

In an Imaginary or Symbolic World

In these applications, the aim is to provide the user with
either playful and artistic imaginary worlds or symbolic worlds
which will employ metaphor to clarify real concepts and
phenomena.

Ii * T0 * P0

Virtual creation. Virtual reality allows for the creation
of ephemeral art works, either through interaction with the
user or by playing with metaphors – Virtual art,
artificial life, etc.

Ii * T0 * P#

Virtual museum. A gathering together of virtual works and
the creation of a virtual museum.

Ii * T0 * PU

Tele-virtuality. Use of clones to link several users
together – Virtual community.

Ii * T+ * (P0 + P#)

Virtual science-fiction. The user is projected into an
unrealistic future world – Virtual work, virtual
games.

Ii * T- * (P0 + P#)

Virtual imaginary past. The user is projected into a past
world which never actually existed.

A Typology of Interfaces

Whenever one speaks of digital interfaces, the image which
springs to mind is that of a user wearing a video-helmet and
electronic glove or joystick and linked up to a computer by
cables. This is the image which the media promotes and, although
it is not entirely accurate, it has the advantage of showing us
that a link exists between daily reality and the virtual
worlds created by interactive technology. Interactivity itself
is not new. What is new, however, are the processes made
possible by multi-modal behavioural interfaces which allow for
real-time immersion in a supplemented reality, one which joins
the real with the virtual. Multi-modal interfaces can be
classified according to their sensory characteristics (sensors)
or their motor characteristics (transmitters). The first inform
the user of changes in the virtual world by means of his senses
while the second inform the computer of the movements and
actions made by the user in the virtual world.

Physical interfaces which link us with virtual reality
– or behavioural interfaces – can be classified as
either Sensory Interfaces (SI) or Motor Interfaces
(MI). However, one type of sensory interface does not correspond
to each sense. Certain physical interfaces can combine a sensory
interface with a motor interface: these are mixed interfaces. We
would suggest the following classification:

Sensory Interface (SI)

Sense

Interface

Sight:

Visual interface (screen and video-helmet)

Hearing:

Interfaces which output sound and voice

Touch:

Interfaces which output tactile and thermal stimulants

Proprioception:

Interfaces which output pressure and movement

Note that proprioception is divided into three fields:
sensitivity to position in space, to movement and to force
exerted on the muscles. The first two correspond to
kinaesthesia.

Motor Interface (MI)

Motor

Interface

Location:

Location sensor

Hand location:

Electronic glove

Eye location:

Oculometer

Locomotion:

Motion and position sensors

Speech:

Interfaces which process vocal commands

Muscle action:

Force and movement sensors

The Importance of the Transmission of Information

The transmission of sensory stimuli and motor responses
affect interfaces differently depending on whether the
transmission is made by physical means (b.p.m.) or without
physical means (w.p.m.). Two categories relate to the sense
organ in question:

Interface

MI

SI

Visual interface

Head movements picked up by electromagnetic and acoustic
waves (w.p.m.) or mechanically (b.p.m.)

Light rays picked up by the eyes (w.p.m.)

Auditory interface

Head movements picked up by electromagnetic and acoustic
waves (w.p.m.) or mechanically (b.p.m.) – Speech (voice
commands) issued by user and transmitted by acoustic waves
(w.p.m.)

Body movement picked up by electromagnetic and acoustic
waves (w.p.m.) or mechanically (b.p.m.)

–

The construction of interfaces which output tactile
stimulants, interfaces which output pressure and interfaces
which simulate body movement encounters considerable technical
difficulties, as these must transmit sensory information by
physical means. The use of these types of interface leads to
installation- or performance-style behavioural aesthetics.

Conclusion

Not so long ago, Lyotard reminded us that the function of
criticism or theory was to transform ‘canvases’ or
paintings into ‘words’ [24]. In
doing this, he was also reminding us of the creative function of
aesthetic theory, which does not simply draw up lists and
inventories, but which actually recreates the world using its
own specific means: language. This creative function would now
seem to be reserved to the contemporary artists who use and
manipulate the technological interfaces available to them. Just
like forms, their materials are also processes and
languages. They are critics as much as they are artists, and
their hybrid works are so many aesthetics questioning the
world. A new history of art seems to be in the process of
emerging. As Roland Barthes wrote:

Another history of painting is possible, which is
not that of works and artists but that of tools and substances;
for a very long time, the artist, among us, was not
distinguished by his instrument, which was, uniformly, the
brush; when painting entered upon its historical crisis, the
instruments were multiplied, and the raw materials as well:
there has been an infinite journey of inscribing objects and
their supports; the limits of the pictural tool have been
continually pushed back [3, 213].

It is now a question of transforming a dense physical reality
into words and, in so doing, of taking part in its staging,
until the coming and going between the real and the virtual
ultimately leads us to the invisible purity of the concept.

Artists working currently are not that different from the
great names of the past. The most influential amongst them have
been those who have succeeded in introducing new techniques and
materials. As Mario Costa has aptly remarked:

The history of the arts is essentially the history
of technical developments: it catalogues the emergence of new
possibilities in productivity and in multiform hybridisation
capacities; the reciprocal influence which art and technical
developments have on each other and, finally, their triumphs and
their decline [8, p.10].

The technological resources of any given period define its
episteme and also its artistic forms. The new technologies are
not at all unrelated to certain of art's predominant
preoccupations: they favour communication, they are flexible and
adaptable to subjective considerations, and they allow art to
reach a broad public. Most importantly, their polymorphous
nature favours creativity. Historically, art has always been
close to the pulse of civilisation and it cannot remain aloof to
the changes in the instrumental, material, immaterial and
logical framework which characterise our age.

Notes

As Telenoia creator Roy Ascott explains,
‘Telenoia is about telematic connectivity,
mind-to-mind across the globe. Artists worldwide making
images, texts, music together. We want to make authoring a
collective experience and a collaborative process. The
themes we hope will weave their way through our networking
will recognize that it's Halloween – a kind of electronic,
metaphysical, out-of-body trick or treat. We also want to
use this 24 hour period, noon Saturday to noon Sunday, to
create a new day of the week – the eighth day of the week.
We'll use email like Earn, Bitnet, as well as Picturetel and
fax. We'll use Macs and Amigas, modems and fax
machines’ [2]. Telenoia celebrates
the networked consciousness of global connectivity.
Computer-mediated, distributed mind-at-large: asynchronous
global connectivity. In celebrating telenoia, we reject the
individualism of the old industrial culture –
solitary, anxious, alienated, neurotically private.
Telenoia replaces paranoia in the telematic culture.

The exhibition Quand les attitudes deviennent
formes (When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your
Head) is considered ‘a historical reference,
presenting for the first time, in Europe, artists such as
Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra and Lawrence Weiner. With this
exhibition, the process of creation is now recognised as a
work of art’ [20].